Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Recognising God's Will

In coming to grips with the realization that God controls the
bad stuff in my life as well as the good, a friend made the comment that far
too many people fall into the trap of placing God’s love one category and then
place the suffering and discontent in their lives into a separate category.

It is so often assumed that God is responsible for the good
things, and that Satan is responsible for all the bad things. But this type of
thinking seems to me to be deeply flawed because it relies on the persons own
definition of what is good and what is bad. In this logic, it is assumed
that humans are capable of correctly understanding whether something is God’s
will or is not.

But this surely has to be a false assumption. How can our
small human minds fully know what is good and what is bad, and surely it is a
little arrogant to suggest that we have the ability to read God’s mind like
that anyway.

I can think of numerous examples from within my own life
where what I thought was the right course of action ended up being wrong, and
what seemed like the wrong direction that God took me, was actually the right
course.

For example, it might seem like a good thing for me to get
all the green traffic lights on the way to my destination, but actually getting
all red lights may save me from being in the truck accident that occurred further
down the road.

Getting sick might seem like a bad thing, until you hear the
news that on the day that you had off work, the Fukushima nuclear power plant where
you work has blown up in a nuclear meltdown.

How many stories like these have we either heard of, or have
personally experienced?

While the good outcomes in these examples may seem obvious, it
is only in hindsight that you notice that the outcomes are in fact good and not
bad as it first seemed. But just think about the amount of bad things that
occur in your life in which you simply fail to notice the good that actually
comes in the end.

God is looking out for us and He “works out everything
for his own ends.” Prov 16:4